Comment by asark

I'm from the middle of the US so all my experience is with $200 and cheaper bicycles (maybe $300 adjusted for inflation) since I'm not in the racing "scene" and bike commuting's infeasible outside very small areas (though I was able to, and did, do it for a while), but bikes never seem to quite work right—one set of brakes keeps slipping no matter how many times you fix it, a couple gears that you just cannot get to hold, tires lose enough air every 48 hours you have to add more to ride yet don't seem to actually have a leak and anyway you changed them once (and god is that a pain) and they still do it, chain keeps getting loose, that kind of thing. The best bicycle I've used I'd have raised hell and tried to return it under lemon laws if it were a car and had that many little problems. Meanwhile $300 is still, what, 1/50th the cost of an entry level new car? That's why it seems high. It seems like you should be able to get 50 very good and reliable bicycles for the same cost as a car. Not 50 that suck. There seem to be improved bits of hardware that fix some of the problems but then you're talking more like 1/20 of an entry level car, which, yikes.